Post #92

The forbidden sidetrip by László Babai. László Babai, the top mathematician in the field of graph isomorphism, turns out, has a zingy autobiographical story called "The forbidden sidetrip" about his trip to Minsk, Moscow, and Leningrad, when it was 1978 and he was 28. It's just fun on its own, but it also contains lots of names of Soviet mathematicians and references about the places where and how math was being built in the late USSR. To my surprise, he knows (knew?) Russian quite well (originally Hungarian) to listen to lectures in the universities. There are stories about how he generally despises anti-semitism by another talented Russian mathematician Pontryagin, and how he was getting into the soviet queues before knowing what they sell, and how you can give "chervonets sverhu" (i.e. greasing the palm) to get the ticket when they are sold out, and lots of other soviet-related stuff that I really love asking older generation about. But among others, it's just interesting to look at the young, not-yet-famous guy who will then climb to the olymp of mathematics. I wish there was a movie about it.